Many U.S. medical schools lack industry money rules

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Only about a third of U.S. medical schools have policies aimed at curbing conflicts of interest arising from their financial ties with companies like drug and medical device makers, researchers said on Tuesday.

Such businesses cultivate deep financial relationships with medical schools. Among other things, industry often relies on academic researchers to conduct studies that may help win government approval for drugs that could generate billions of dollars in sales.

The researchers asked 125 U.S. medical schools about their policies governing financial ties with industry. Eighty-six schools responded to the 2006 survey.

Only 38 percent had adopted a policy covering financial interests held by the institution. Thirty-seven percent were working on adopting such a policy, and the final 25 percent were doing nothing.

"Frankly I'm a little surprised at the slow rate of uptake," Eric Campbell of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, who helped lead the study, said in a telephone interview. "It's somewhat shocking to me that they (the policies) don't exist more frequently."

About 70 percent of the schools had policies governing conflicts of interest in financial relationships between industry and individual senior and mid-level officials.

But when it came to policing the actual institution's money ties to industry, the schools were more reluctant.

Campbell said he did not know how much the failure of some schools to adopt conflict-of-interest policies was driven by a desire to protect the influx of industry cash.

"I suspect it very well could be," said Campbell, whose findings appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

'IT DOES TAKE WILL'

Dr. David Korn, chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges representing these schools, said he was "somewhat disappointed" by the number of them without such policies. Korn said he did not have figures on how much industry money was going to schools.

"It does take will," Korn said in a telephone interview.

Korn said his group and the Association of American Universities later this month plan to release a blueprint for medical schools to devise and apply such policies. They will be calling on every school to have one in place within two years.

The flow of industry money into medical schools has led some critics to ask whether it may be intended at least in part to buy influence in these schools while potentially harming the independence and integrity of research and education programs.

"For example, imagine a psychiatry program that gets a bunch of money each year for their residency program from a company that makes antidepressants. It's conceivable that it would have a negative effect on the amount of time that this residency program spent teaching doctors to treat depression with things other than drugs," Campbell said.